Oh, perhaps Malti doesn't get e-mails sent to the list, here is a forwarded copy of my message (CC'ed to the list so that nobody else gets the idea of forwarding the message to Malti)

/Tobias

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tobias Ivarsson <thobes@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 5, 2007 10:47 AM
Subject: Re: [Digifri] OpenOffice documents in TNE054
To: "Studentföreningen för digitala fri- och rättigheter." <digifri@lists.lysator.liu.se>

Hi,
this is the way it has been. But recently Adobe announced that they will open up the PDF standard and release it to ISO ( http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/29/1114228 ). So even if the Portable document format was proprietary previously, it will be open soon enough.

/Tobias


On 2/5/07, Philip Jägenstedt < philip@foolip.org> wrote:
Hi again!

That's more about PDF than I knew. When you push it, I'm not actually
sure how we in Digifri define "open format", even though we say it a
whole lot. CCing our list, anyone of you guys know?

-- Philip

On 2/4/07, Abdellah Malti < abdma118@student.liu.se> wrote:
> Thanks for the prompt reply.
>
> As I understand it, PDF is a royalty-free licensed disclosed standard
> but, no matter how you put it, it's still proprietary. This little
> nuance is what stirred my apprehension towards PDFs. Practically,
> there's no obstacle to me handing in a PDF or even (god forbid!) an MS
> office document, as OpenOffice can handle both to some extent; It's
> purely ideological.
>
> But then again, may be it's the perfect opportunity to start learning
> some of your Scandinavian pragmatism...
>
>
> /Malti
>
>
>
> On Sun, 2007-02-04 at 11:45 +0800, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
> > Hello!
> >
> > Unfortunately we are not a strong lobby group with a lot of power.
> > What we want is for course information and assignments to be in open
> > formats. PDF is such a format. If you use OpenOffice you can simply
> > export to PDF.
> >
> > Even though the document format used by OpenOffice is open it is not
> > supported by very many applications other than OpenOffice. We cannot
> > (don't want to) demand that teaching staff use free software
> > themselves, we just don't want students to be forced to do so. In your
> > case, would there be a problem with handing in a PDF?
> >
> > -- Philip
> >
> > On 2/4/07, Abdellah Malti <abdma118@student.liu.se > wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I'm a new Liu student studying the molecular electronics masters program
> > > in Norrköping. The TNE054 course taught by Mats Fahlman
> > > http://staffwww.itn.liu.se/~matfa/ is part of my curriculum, and the
> > > instructor would only accept documents in Word or Pdf format. I tried,
> > > of course, talking him into accepting an open standard (OpenOffice comes
> > > to mind) but sadly, I don't seem to have been convincing enough.
> > >
> > > You guys will hopefully have more leverage on the issue.
> > >
> > > Thanks for your time.
> > >
> > > /Malti
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Digifri mailing list
> > > Digifri@lists.lysator.liu.se
> > > http://lists.lysator.liu.se/mailman/listinfo/digifri
> > >
>
>


--
Philip Jägenstedt
E-mail/Jabber: philip@foolip.org
Website: http://foolip.org
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